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3
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Formalism

Poetry does not inhere in any particular element but depends

upon the set of relationships, the structure, which
we call the poem.
ROBERT PENN WARREN, “Pure and Impure Poetry”

F ormalism probably has the distinction of having more names than any other
recently developed school of criticism. The model, as defined by American
and English critics, has been called the New Criticism (long after it was no
longer new), as well as aesthetic or textual (because of its primary concerns) or
ontological (because of its philosophical grounding). Then, too, there is Russian
formalism, which shares some fundamental characteristics with its Western
cousin, but it is the ideas of the writers known as the New Critics, referred to
here as formalist criticism, that in the 1930s revolutionized the work of scholars,
critics, and teachers in the United States. For decades people learned to read,
analyze, and appreciate literature using this approach, making it one of the
most influential methods of literary analysis that twentieth-century readers
encountered.
Formalism’s sustained popularity among readers comes primarily from the
fact that it provides them with a way to understand and enjoy a work for its
own inherent value as a piece of literary art. Emphasizing close reading of the
work itself, formalism puts the focus on the text as literature. It does not treat
the text as an expression of social, religious, or political ideas; neither does it
reduce the text to being a promotional effort for some cause or belief. As a re-
sult, formalism makes those who apply its principles and follow its processes bet-
ter, more discerning readers.

33
 34 CHAPTER 3
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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
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Any new school of criticism is both an offspring of those that have preceded it
and a reaction against them. The New Criticism, with its emphasis on unity and
form, is the direct descendant of the aesthetic theories of the romantic poets (and
the philosopher-critics before them). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example,
believed that the spirit of poetry must “embody in order to reveal itself; but a
living body is of necessity an organized one—and what is organization but the
connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and means!”
Form to him was not simply the visible, external shape of literature. It was some-
thing “organic,” “innate.” He explained that “it shapes as it develops itself from
within, and the fulness [sic] of its development is one and the same with the
perfection of its outward form. Such is the life, such the form.”
The New Criticism was more directly born as a reaction against the atten-
tion that scholars and teachers in the early part of the twentieth century paid to
the biographical and historical context of a work, thereby diminishing the atten-
tion given to the literature itself. Instead of dealing directly with a poem, for
example, the previous generation’s critics were likely to treat it as a sociological
or historical record. It could be an excuse to indulge one’s fascination with the
lives of writers and their friends. When the critics and scholars did directly
address the text, they tended to describe their own impressions of it. Clearly,
something more scientific was called for, some better way of understanding and
evaluating a poem or play.
Enter New Criticism, a theory of literature that would have a reader under-
stand and value a work for its own inherent worth, not for its service to metali-
terary matters. The movement began informally in the 1920s at Vanderbilt
University in discussions among John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren,
Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others who were interested in getting together
to talk about literature. For three years, they published a literary magazine called
The Fugitive. Not only influenced by one another but also bolstered by the work
of theorists from abroad, such as T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Emp-
son, they began to develop their own ideas of how to read a text. Important to
their thinking, for example, was Eliot’s announcement of the high place of art as
art rather than as expression of social, religious, or political ideas. They were
influenced, too, by Eliot’s explanation of how emotion is expressed in art. He
called it the objective correlative, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external
facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is im-
mediately evoked.” From Richards, who was concerned with the investigation
of meaning, they adopted the practice of working toward the scrupulous expli-
cation of poems. Although the Fugitives would later become well known for
their own poems and stories, they are also remembered for beginning to formu-
late principles of literary analysis that would shape the habits of serious readers for
several decades to come.
The New Criticism went on to develop a sense of the importance of form
(leading at some point to this area of criticism being called formalism), their
 FORMALISM 35
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practice emphasizing the close reading of texts and an appreciation of order. It

asserted that understanding a work comes from looking at it as a self-sufficient
object with formal elements, laws of its own that could be studied. To know
how a work creates meaning became the quest. In time, formalist principles
were set firmly in place with acceptance by such prestigious literary journals as
the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review and by college adoptions of Brooks and
Warren’s texts An Approach to Literature (with John Purser in 1936), Understanding
Poetry (1939), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Understanding Drama (by Brooks
and Robert Heilman in 1948). It was also supported by the publication of
anthologies such as The House of Fiction, by Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate
(1950), which features commentary on how to read the short fiction collected
in the volume. The wide dissemination of formalist principles led, finally, to their
dominance of American, and to some extent English, literary studies through the
1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s.

Russian Formalism
Critics involved with the formalist movement that took place in the United
States and the Russian formalists are sometimes thought to be members of the
same group, or at least closely related, because of the movements’ similar names.
In actuality, the two groups are only distantly connected. The latter flourished in
Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1920s, and although the principles they
espoused have some similarity to those of the New Critics, they are two separate
schools. In fact, because the work of the Russian formalists was based on the
theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French linguist, they are probably more
closely related to the structuralists, who were to garner attention in the 1950s
and 1960s (see Chapter 8). Saussure’s influence is seen, for example, in the
Russian formalists’ argument that literature is a systematic set of linguistic and
structural elements that can be analyzed. They saw literature as a self-enclosed
system that can be studied not for its content but for its form.
Even the Moscow formalists and the St. Petersburg formalists did not agree on
everything, although they did hold some beliefs in common. For example, both
rejected the nineteenth-century view that literature expresses an author’s world-
view, making biographical criticism the key to understanding a text. They also
agreed that literature could (and should) be studied in a scientific manner, with
the purpose of understanding it for its own sake, not as a medium for discussing
other subjects. Consequently, form was more important to them than content.
Their focus was on poetics—the strategies a writer used—rather than on history,
biography, or subject matter.
The Russian formalists also asserted that everyday language is just that:
everyday or ordinary. Literary language is different. It deviates from the expected,
using all the devices an author has the power to manipulate to make what is
familiar seem strange and unfamiliar. In fact, Victor Shklovsky coined the term
defamiliarization to refer to the literary process that gives vitality to language
that might otherwise be all too predictable. Defamiliarization is the artful aspect
of a work that makes the reader alert and alive; it causes the reader to intensify
 36 CHAPTER 3
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the attention paid to the text, to look again at an image in an effort to take in the
unexpected.
Another difference between reality and its representation in words is evident
in the Russian formalists’ distinction between story ( fibula) and plot (sjuzhet).
The former refers to the actual sequence of events in a narrative; the latter, to
the artistic presentation, which can jumble the sequence, repeat episodes, or
include surprises. The literary treatment defamiliarizes the world and heightens
the reader’s awareness of it.
In 1930 the Soviet government forced the Russian formalists to disband
because they were unwilling to treat literature as an expression of Soviet ideol-
ogy. Some of the leading proponents moved to Prague, where they continued
their work. Eventually two of them, Roman Jakobson and René Wellek, emi-
grated to America, where they met with the New Critics. Whatever influence
may have come of those discussions, it is now evident that both groups shared a
belief in the acceptance of literature as a language separate and distinct from its
everyday form, one that deserves close analysis of its characteristics and elements.

Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), another Russian literary theorist of the twentieth
century, does not fit easily into any one school of modern literary criticism. His
thinking ranged through a widely diverse set of academic disciplines and interests
that included philosophy, ethics, cultural criticism, literary history, and more,
making it difficult to put him into a single category of study. He has sometimes
been identified with the Russian formalists, but he clearly has differences with
them. At other times he has been called a Marxist critic, since he was writing
in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s, but those doctrines never dominated
his work. Although he is difficult to fit into any single classification, the impact
of his thinking on many fields of study makes it impossible to overlook him.
Because he was at work at generally the same time as the American formalists
and the Russian formalists, despite his differences with them, his ideas will be
discussed at this point.
The breadth of Bakhtin’s interests has brought his views to the attention of
scholars in many fields, making him influential in such varied disciplines as semi-
otics, religious criticism, and structuralism. He is held by many to be one of the
outstanding thinkers of his era. Tzvetan Todorov called him perhaps the greatest
twentieth-century theorist of literature.
Some of the difficulty of studying Bakhtin is due to his being during his
lifetime a fairly obscure writer, even in his own homeland, until he was redis-
covered by Russian scholars in the 1960s. Few of his works were published in
authoritative editions during his lifetime, and disagreement still exists over which
texts he actually wrote. Some of those that he coauthored are simply attributed
to “the Bakhtin group.” Others, including his work on the eighteenth-century
German novel, which had been accepted for publication, disappeared during the
German invasion of World War II, and a manuscript on the Bildungsroman he
himself damaged by using its pages to roll cigarettes. He did not come to
 FORMALISM 37
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the notice of the West until the late 1960s when Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan
Todorov brought him to the attention of the French literary world. Notice
then quickly spread to the United Kingdom and the United States, and by the
late 1980s he had become a leading scholar and thinker among those interested
in language and culture.
The details of Bakhtin’s life are equally uncertain. Information was routinely
suppressed during his lifetime, and the political unrest in Russia at that time has
made personal records difficult to come by. We know that he was born in Oryol,
Russia, outside of Moscow, to an old family of the nobility, and that he spent his
childhood in various cities. After earning a degree in classics and philology in 1918,
he moved to Nevel (Pskov Oblast), a small city in western Russia, where he
worked as a schoolteacher for two years. At that time the first “Bakhtin Circle,” a
group composed of intellectuals with varying interests, came together. Bound by
their shared passion for discussing literary, religious, and political subjects, with
German philosophy as one of the chief topics, they provided stimulus for the birth
of some of the concepts that Bakhtin would develop throughout his career. The
group included, among others, Valentin Voloshinov and P. N. Medvedev. In 1923
Bakhtin was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that eventually cost him
his leg.
His troubles were not solely physical. Throughout his lifetime Bakhtin
struggled with the politics of Russia. He did not have Communist Party creden-
tials, a lack that sometimes denied him public notice, although it may also have
saved him from the Stalinist purges. In 1929, shortly after publication of Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Art, his first major work, he was accused of participating in an
antigovernment movement of the Russian Orthodox Church and of “corrupting
the young,” a charge that was never proven, and sentenced to ten years in exile
in Siberia. Appealing on the basis of his health, he received a reduced sentence of
six years of internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he worked as a bookkeeper and
wrote several important essays, including “Discourse in the Novel.”
In 1924 Bakhtin moved to Leningrad and later to Moscow, where he
wrote a dissertation, “Rabelais and His World,” to earn a postgraduate degree.
The dissertation could not be defended until the end of World War II, and
when it was, its unorthodox ideas sharply divided the scholarly community.
In the end he was granted the doctorate, though he could not publish his dis-
sertation. It went unread until it was rediscovered by graduate students at the
Gorky Institute in the 1960s and finally published in 1965. He taught at
Mordov Pedagogical Institute (now University of Saranak) from the late 1940s
until 1961.
The published works for which he is best known are Problems of Dostoyevs-
ky’s Poetics (the only book to be published under his name before Stalin’s death),
Rabelais and His World (his dissertation), and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
by M. M. Bakhtin. “Discourse in the Novel,” often referenced by those who
think and write about Bakhtin’s theories, is one of the essays in The Dialogic Imag-
ination. In these works, all of them from a relatively early part of his life, he in-
troduces the key concepts of his literary and cultural theory. They include
dialogism, unfinalizability, heteroglossia, polyphony, and carnival.
 38 CHAPTER 3
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Dialogism At the core of Bakhtin’s literary theories is the concept of dialogism,

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the seeds of which are evident in some of his earliest known writings from the
1920s in which he criticizes Russian formalism for its abstract nature, which is
evident in its lack of attention to the content of literary works. He then censures
linguistics, and the work of Saussure in particular, for separating texts from their
social context, for ignoring the relations that exist between speakers and texts.
He argues that the structuralists (see Chapter 8) look only at the shape (the struc-
ture) of language and ignore how people use it. Such thinking eventually led
him to assert that language (all forms of speech and writing) is always a dialogue,
which consists of at least one speaker, one listener/respondent, and a relationship
between the two. Language, for him, is the product of the interactions between
(at least) two people. It is not monologic, an utterance issuing from a single
speaker or writer.
The idea has applications on several levels. For the individual, it means that
because it is language that defines a person, and one utterance is always respond-
ing to other utterances (even in those internal conversations in our heads), one is
always in a process of becoming. And since the individual is always changing,
nobody can be wholly understood or fully revealed. Bakhtin calls the condition
in which people cannot be completely known unfinalizability.
On a more general level, dialogism sees works of literature to be in commu-
nication with each other and with other authors. One shapes the other, not just
by influencing new works but by adding to the understanding of those that have
preceded it as well as those that follow it. Works of literature do not merely
answer or correct each other but inform and become informed by them. In an
even more global manner, such thinking means that all language exists in re-
sponse to what has already been said and in anticipation of what will be said.
All thought is dynamic, growing and changing with each utterance.

Heteroglossia Many different languages exist in any single culture, and an in-
dividual uses a wide variety of them in any given day. Think about your day so
far, considering how you have shifted languages, probably all of them English,
but different types of English, as you changed listeners (or readers). How did
the self you put forward in the different situations change with the languages
you were using? How did the language both create and affect your relationship
with the listener/reader? How did the context generate meaning?
Heteroglossia is the term Bakhtin uses to refer to the interplay of the nu-
merous forms of social speech that people use as they go about their daily lives. It
refers to the manner in which their diverse ways of speaking—their differing
vocabularies, accents, expressions, and rhetorical strategies—mix with each other.
It can be described as living language because it features multiplicity and variety;
it carries suggestions of different professions, age groups, and backgrounds that
intersect and shape each other, generating meaning through what he calls the
“primacy of context over text.”
Bakhtin maintains that two forces are in operation whenever language is
used. Borrowing terms from physics, he calls them centripetal and centrifugal
forces. The former pushes things toward a central point; centrifugal force pushes
 FORMALISM 39
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them away from the center and out in all directions. Heteroglossic language,
according to Bakhtin, is centrifugal because of its dynamism and relativism. Its
opposite, monologic language, is centripetal, because it forces everything into a
single form or statement that comes from one authority. It standardizes language
and rhetorical forms, ridding itself of differences in an effort to establish a single
way of speaking and writing that is a pure, regimented discourse cleansed of dif-
ferences that interrupt the accepted way of using language.
To apply his theories to literary genres, Bakhtin examines poetry and the
novel in particular. Acknowledging that poetry has historically been the more
highly valued form, he asserts that because the two genres have different pur-
poses, they use language (create meaning) in different ways.
Poetry, he asserts, is an art form; it has an aesthetic function. It does not do
anything. Operating as a self-sufficient whole, it is aware only of itself. It exists
unconnected to its context and does not acknowledge its respondent. For exam-
ple, in a poem a word refers only to itself or to an object that exists as an abstrac-
tion, not as a specific item. Consequently, Bakhtin concludes that poetry is
essentially monologic. (He also views the epic and drama as monologic, but he
pays particular attention to poetry.)
In contrast, prose (indeed, rhetoric in general—which seeks to use language
to persuade or convince), has a social purpose; it does something. The novel in
particular holds the attention of Bakhtin because it is dialogic (centrifugal), and
with its diversity of voices, it is heteroglossic. It can be said to be characterized by
dialogized heteroglossia. That is, it is composed of multiple experiences and
worldviews in ongoing dialogue with each other, creating numerous interac-
tions, some of them actual, some of them fictive, making it well positioned to
oppose the standardization promoted by monologic genres. (Even the novelist is
part of the interaction, as he or she is aware of a reader who is likely to have
responses that affect what is written.) Bakhtin deems the commenting narrator’s
dialogic utterances to be the most important ones because through them a com-
plex unity of diverse voices, interactions, and relationships form. He celebrates
the novel for its “dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien
words, value judgments and accents” that form complex, ever shifting patterns.
In it a multiplicity of languages clash, just as they do in any given culture.

Polyphony
Bakhtin uses the term polyphonic to describe the novel that depicts a world in
which the dialogue goes on ad infinitum without reaching a conclusion or clo-
sure. The structure is not predetermined to demonstrate the author’s worldview,
nor are the characters drawn to exemplify it. It is typified by the novels of
Dostoyevsky, in which the reader hears many voices uttering contradictory and
inconsistent statements in the context of a real-life event. Truth in Dostoyevsky’s
works is perceived through multiple consciousnesses and expressed in many
simultaneous voices, not conceived in a single mind and spoken by a single
speaker. There is no central voice in his novels, only multiple unfinalizable char-
acters that talk about ideas in their distinctive, individual ways. They exist with
 40 CHAPTER 3
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each other and through each other as they interact in social circumstances. In
addition to the characters that participate in the experience, there are the author
and the reader, too, who with the characters help to create the novel’s “truths,”
not simply one certain truth. Characters influence characters. Readers watch as
they shape each other and listen as their utterances conflict with each other, all
the while filtering the characters’ observations through their own experiences
and understanding. Bakhtin contrasts Dostoyevsky’s approach with that of the
nonpolyphonic monologism of Tolstoy, who reveals his own understanding of
truth by expressing it through his characters’ words, actions, and choices.

Carnival Another key concept in Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is that of

carnival, an idea that made its first appearance in his dissertation, “Rabelais
and His World,” and was further developed in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.
His notion of carnival builds on the ancient tradition of the Saturnalia, a Roman
festival that mocked and reversed the official culture, if only for a short while.
For a limited period of time the powerless became the powerful, the outsider
became the insider, slave and master exchanged roles.
Bakhtin judges the novel to operate with a similar social impact. Building on
his study of Rabelais’s novel cycle Gargantua and Pantagruel, the protagonists of
which he sees not only as a challenge to an official culture ruled by dogmatism
and deadly seriousness but also as producers of energy and vitality, he extends
that analysis to consider the novel as a genre that uses laughter and parody to
challenge restrictive social forces, such as the tyranny and repression of his own
day. It obliterates social hierarchies and blurs distinctions between young and old,
rich and poor, public and private, in short reversing the traditional systems of
authority and order. In doing so, it opens the way to joyful renewal.
The polyphonic nature of the novel, in which the reader hears conflicting
statements from many voices interacting and helping to shape each other, is
carnivalesque. The clash of ideas destroys any notion of regular conventions,
standardization, or rules, and even suggests a certain freedom of being. Each
character is individually defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses how
each is influenced by the other. Each one is touched by the others, and in turn
shapes the character of the others. Carnival is the context in which voices are
singly heard but interact together.

READING AS A FORMALIST

To understand the following discussion, you should read the short story “Araby,” by James
Joyce, which begins on page 327.

The critic who wants to write about literature from a formalist perspective
must first be a close and careful reader who examines all the elements of a text
individually and questions how they come together to create a work of art. Such
a reader, who respects the autonomy of a work, achieves an understanding of
it by looking inside it, not outside it or beyond it. Instead of examining historical
 FORMALISM 41
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periods, author biographies, or literary styles, for example, he or she will

approach a text with the assumption that it is a self-contained entity and that he
or she is looking for the governing principles that allow the text to reveal itself.
For example, the correspondences between the characters in James Joyce’s short
story “Araby” and the people he knew personally may be interesting, but for the
formalist they are less pertinent to understanding how the story creates meaning
than are other kinds of information that the story contains within itself.
Because formalism calls for a close reading of the text, the first time through
a given work you cannot expect to notice all the subtleties and details that will
ultimately figure in your analysis. It is on subsequent readings that the formalist
perspective begins to take shape. The second time around, you may begin to
notice repetition of words and images, patterns of sound, multiple meanings,
and ambiguous dialogue. You will ultimately investigate every detail of a work
for its contribution to and connection with the whole. Such observations made
by the scrupulous reader are the key to discovering how all the formal elements
of the text work together. Some of the main elements that call for attention are
form, diction, and unity, as well as the various literary devices they subsume.

Form
Coleridge’s concept of the organic, innate nature of form in a literary work
(noted earlier) is reflected in the formalists’ assumption that although the exter-
nal, easily noted ordering of a poem or story (e.g., its rhyme scheme or sequence
of events leading to a climax) may be significant in an analysis, form is actually
the whole that is produced by various structural elements working together.
Form grows out of the work’s recurrences, repetitions, relationships, motifs—
all the organizational devices that create the total effect. Together they are the
statement of the work. Thus, form and content are inseparable.
Because what a poem or prose work means depends on how it is said, to
understand it the formalist reader-writer pays attention to how all the parts affect
each other and how they fit together. In early readings, then, you may find it
helpful to make marginal notations where words and phrases recur. Even if the
wording is not repeated exactly, there may be synonyms that echo important
words. Images, too, can gain significance by appearing more than once. They
may be random or may form a regular pattern; either way, they deserve to be
noted, because they begin to create form and unity.
In a narrative, the point of view from which a story is told is a significant
shaping force. Because the reader is given only the information that the narrator
knows, as he or she understands it and chooses to share it, the storyteller controls
the reader’s perception of the fictive world and thereby determines how the reader
grasps the integral and meaningful relationship of all its parts. Of course, the
omniscient narrator, who speaks with a third-person voice, is assumed to see all,
but if a major or minor character in the narrative recounts the narrative, the reader
must question how that teller’s part in the story affects his or her understanding
and presentation of it. Is the narrator reliable? Biased? Does the narrator have a
reason to leave out events or reshape them? What is the teller’s ethical stance?
 42 CHAPTER 3
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You can also use your reading log to address a number of issues regarding
the formal qualities of a text. Some relevant questions, such as the following, can
help you start to think about these qualities.
■ Does this work follow a traditional form, such as the Petrarchan sonnet, or
does it chart its own development?
■ How are the events of the plot recounted—for example, in sequential fash-
ion or as a flashback?
■ How does the work’s organization affect its meaning?
■ Does the denouement in a plot surprise or satisfy you?
■ Does the denouement provide closure to the narrative or leave it open?
■ What is the effect of using a particular meter—say, anapestic tetrameter?
■ What is the effect of telling a story from this point of view?
■ What sounds are especially important in developing this piece? (In poems,
be sure to look for more than end rhyme.)
■ What recurrences of words, images, and sounds do you notice?
■ Do the recurrences make a pattern, or do they appear randomly?
■ What rhythms are in the words? (This question is applicable to prose as well
as poetry.)
■ Where do images foreshadow later events?
■ How does the narrator’s point of view shape the meaning?
■ What visual patterns do you find in this text?
■ What progressions of nature are used to suggest meaning—for example,
sunrise/sunset, spring/winter?
■ If you were to make a chart of the progress of this plot or poem, what
would it look like?
Sometimes, particularly in works written in the past few decades, form is
hard to determine. Conventions that serve as guideposts for the reader may be
few. Theater of the absurd, for instance, delights in a lack of traditional elements
that an audience would look to for help. However, no form is also form. Notice
how the seeming absence of form suggests a chaotic world in which there is no
meaning.
As a formalist, then, you will look for meaning in all the organizational ele-
ments at hand, even those that seem distorted or “absurd.” But simply listing
them is not enough. You must then determine how their interaction creates
meaning. What is the effect of the whole? How do the parts of the poem that
give it order come together to assume a unique shape that presents readers with a
unique experience? How does structure become meaning?
Looking at “Araby,” for example, the reader easily recognizes that the
narrative unfolds chronologically, but he or she also perceives that more is taking
place here than a simple sequence of events involving a romantic desire to go to
a bazaar. On the surface of the story, little seems to happen, but beneath it, more
 FORMALISM 43
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subtle conflicts and changes are transpiring. With that recognition, it is possible
to see “Araby” as an initiation story in which the protagonist begins with childish
dreams, moves through a test of will and commitment, and arrives at a new,
adult sense of the world. The boy’s maturation could be described as a down-
ward emotional spiral as he moves from a sense of the holiness of the world to
frustration with its obstacles and then rage at its emptiness. The bottom of the
spiral is marked by his recognition of the futility of his efforts to make it other-
wise. Though the journey begins as he listens to the sounds of innocent child’s
play, it ends with a recognition of humankind’s aloneness in a darkened world.
The form of “Araby” can also be described in other ways. You could, for
example, compare it with other stories of quest, in which the protagonist
searches for a holy relic, traveling from place to place (in this case making the
train journey, which he must take alone) and enduring ordeals in the service of
his mission. You could also describe it as circular, for it begins with physical
death (a priest had died in the back room, where the air is still musty, and the
garden is yellowed and “straggling”) and ends with the death of innocence and
belief, which those earlier images foreshadowed. You could even say that it is a
mythic pattern, as it recounts a single episode from childhood to suggest the
larger pattern of human experience in which innocence is succeeded by knowl-
edge, dreams by reality, childhood by adulthood.

Diction
Words hold the keys to meaning. A formalist will look at words closely, question-
ing all of their denotations (explicit dictionary meanings) and connotations
(implied but not directly indicated meanings). As Brooks posited, the reader
must consider how a word or phrase creates meaning that no other word or phrase
could. Etymology (the history of a word) becomes significant, and allusions to
other works may import surprising meanings. Tracing allusions is a sticky point
for formalists, because it means going outside the text to find meaning. Neverthe-
less, if the reader is to explore all facets of the text, it is important to discover
everything that a given reference suggests.
Locution that has more than a single possibility for interpretation is valued for
the richness it brings to the whole. Unlike the scientist, who strives for directness
and singularity of meaning, the poet, who speaks of experience, uses ambiguity
to reach for meaning through language that is suggestive, compressed, and multi-
leveled. The poet may, for example, choose words that can bear the load of
several, sometimes divergent meanings, as Gerard Manley Hopkins did in “The
Windhover.” In that poem, he used the word buckle, which can mean “crumple”
but also suggests “join” or “bend” and perhaps other possibilities.
When an incident, object, or person is used both literally (as itself) and figura-
tively (as something else), it becomes a symbol. In other words, a symbol refers
simultaneously to itself and to something beyond the self in order to expand the
meaning of the text and provide additional possibilities for the discovery of mean-
ing. The U.S. flag is a flag, for instance, but it may also make a viewer think of
freedom and country. Symbols are often recognizable because they grow out of
 44 CHAPTER 3
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images or phrases that recur with higher-than-expected frequency or that receive

an inordinate amount of attention by the narrator. Such is the case with the train
trip the boy in “Araby” must take to reach the fair. As he travels alone through the
dark night, the journey becomes more than a physical one; he is also moving
psychologically from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood.
Because it is meaningful in the context of the images, plot structure, and other
elements of the story, the symbol contributes to the story’s unity.
In your reading log, you will find it helpful to note the quality of language
in a selection:
■ Record any words you do not know.
■ Find words that appear more than once. Do their meanings change with
subsequent use? Or do they grow more powerful?
■ Look for words that suggest meanings they do not explicitly state.
■ Identify terms (titles of books, quotations, paraphrases) that point to other
works that would add meaning to the one you are reading.
■ Look up the history of words that appear at important points of a story or
poem. Do other, older meanings suggest anything about their use here?
■ Where did you find ambiguity? How does it suggest additional meanings?
■ What are the important symbols, and how do they create unity?
When applied to “Araby,” these approaches reveal that its language is particu-
larly rich and subtle, with connotations radiating out of words that initially seem to
be merely literal or factual. The opening paragraph alone—with its use of blind
(twice), its reference to the school as a prison (at the end of the day setting the
boys “free”), and its description of the uninhabited, detached house in a neighbor-
hood of “brown imperturbable faces”—suggests a society in which something im-
portant has been lost, a world in which dreams will not survive. It stands in contrast
to the language used to describe the boy’s private, inner world, where he worships
the sister of his friend Mangan, whom he thinks of as a holy figure surrounded by
an aura of light. Describing his devotion, he stresses its sacred nature by using
Christian language. He says, “I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a
throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and
praises which I myself did not understand.” The ambiguity in “Araby,” its use of
words that suggest more than a single meaning, creates a sense of mystery that is
part of both the boy’s devotion to holy mysteries and the mystery of human life.
For instance, the descriptions of Mangan’s sister, who does little and says only a few
words, imply that she is both human and holy. When the boy recounts his vision
of her, he says, “The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve
of her neck, lit up the hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the
railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat,
just visible as she stood at ease.” In his words, she is both a sexual and a sacred being.
He is attracted by her sensuality but also sees her as a holy icon surrounded by light.
Obviously the diction of “Araby” suggests more than a first reading might
indicate. The formalist critic will push on the story’s language to reveal meanings
that are not readily noticed in an effort to find suggested meanings rather than
 FORMALISM 45
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explicit ones. The result is an enriched understanding of the experiences of the

boy, his world, and his understanding of it.

Unity
If a work has unity, all of its aspects fit together in significant ways that create a
whole. Each element, through its relationship to the others, contributes to the
totality of the work, its meaning. Patterns that inform and give relevance to the rest
often appear as verbal motifs, images, symbols, figurative language, meter, rhyme, or
sound. The narrator’s point of view can also be an important unifying element.
Unity is created, for example, when a single image or figure of speech is
extended throughout a work or when several images or figures form a pattern.
The appearance may be a relatively simple repeated reference to a color or sound
or the more complicated use of figurative language, an intentional departure
from normal word meaning, such as a metaphor. For example, when a word
or phrase is used to refer to a person or object to which it is not logically appli-
cable, as in Emily Dickinson’s assertion that “hope is the thing with feathers,”
the metaphorical statement is an imaginative way of identifying one thing with
another. Stretched and elaborated, images and figures grow rich and complex, as
is easily noticed in the poems of the metaphysical poets, whose works the New
Critics celebrated. To see how the protracted, embellished use of an image or
figure can enhance and complicate meaning, read John Donne’s “A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning” or shorter poems, such as “The Silken Tent,” by Robert
Frost, or Emily Dickinson’s “I Like to See It Lap the Miles.”
In the most powerful works, the elements do not come together easily or
comfortably. In fact, the formalist critic looks for these elements to resist one
another, creating what Tate called tension, or the push of conflicting elements
against each other. Tension often appears in the form of irony (the use of a
word or a statement that is the opposite of what is intended), paradox (a con-
tradiction that is actually true), and ambiguity (a word, statement, or situation
that has more than one possible meaning). For example, a piece of fiction’s point
of view becomes more complicated, and more interesting to a formalist, if the
narrator is not aware of the whole story but must tell it from limited knowledge
or understanding. The possibilities for paradox, irony, and ambiguity grow when
the storyteller operates without fully comprehending the dimensions of the
events and characters of the narrative.
In your reading journal, you may want to ask some questions about the
unity of the selection you are studying:
■ What images are extended or elaborated?
■ Where do several images work together to create meaning?
■ What is paradoxical in the work? How is it both contradictory and true?
What is ironic in the work?
■ Do all the elements cohere in ways that generate meaning?
■ Are the verbal motifs, images, figures of speech, symbols, meter, rhyme, and
sound consistent? If not, what did you have to reconcile?
 46 CHAPTER 3
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“Araby” is rich in paradox, ambiguity, and irony, though it is the last one
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that most clearly creates tension in this story. For example, when the boy finally
arrives at the bazaar, the hall is in darkness and silence, “like that which pervades
a church after a service.” He recognizes that despite his devotion, his fidelity, and
his desire to serve his dream, he has come too late. What he has expected, indeed
what the reader feels he has deserved, has not come to pass. His situation is an
ironic one in which he finds the opposite of what he made his journey to reach.
Araby, the place of romance and enchantment, is as mundane as his own neigh-
borhood. His holy quest has led to darkness.
Paradox often occurs along with irony, and many elements in Joyce’s story
are paradoxical. The boys’ school, for example, is called the Christian Brothers’
School, but it is described as a prison. In fact, the references to Christian objects
and symbols, which abound in the story, are mostly paradoxes. The boy’s gar-
den, for example, has a central (dying) apple tree, he prays in the back room
(where the priest died), and at the end of the story, a voice calls out, in an inver-
sion to God’s command “Let there be light,” that the light has gone out. There
is paradox, too, in the boy’s devotion; it is simultaneously sad (because it is
doomed) and laughable (because it is childish). And Mangan’s sister, both holy
and profane, is perhaps not simply ambiguous but paradoxical.
As with irony and ambiguity, such paradoxes require the reader to reconcile
them to resolve the tension they create so that the text becomes a unified whole.
The opposition of formal elements, which must be overcome if the work is to
achieve wholeness, gives it the complexity one finds in life itself. As Warren pointed
out in his essay “Pure and Impure Poetry,” the poet “wins by utilizing the resistance
of his opponent—the ambiguity, irony, and paradox, which, since everything in
the work has to be accounted for, the reader must resolve to discover meaning.”

What Doesn’t Appear in Formalist Criticism

Just as the formalist critic must approach a work with a heightened awareness of
form, diction, and unity (including finding and examining the significance of
ambiguity, paradox, and irony), some other analytical techniques are to be avoided
strenuously. They include the heresy of paraphrase, the intentional fallacy,
biographical examination, and the affective fallacy. Because these techniques
lead the reader away from the poem, instead of into it, formalist critics do not
consider them valid critical tools.

Paraphrase If a reader accepts the principles of formalism, any change to a text—

whether it be in form, diction, or unifying devices—makes the work no longer
itself. To restate a poem or summarize a story is to lose it. Its uniqueness disappears.
Any alteration of wording or structure or point of view changes the meaning of the
original and cannot, therefore, be valid.

Intention What an author intended to do is not important, argue the formalists.

What the author actually did is the reader’s concern. To indulge concern about
what he or she had planned to do is to commit the intentional fallacy. In The
 FORMALISM 47
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Verbal Icon, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley question whether an author’s
intentions can ever be known, as those intentions often lie below the conscious
level. Even if the author’s intentions are overtly stated, they may not have been
carried out. Authors, they observe, are not necessarily reliable witnesses of such
matters. One can add that neither are they necessarily good critics of their own
work. Sometimes they don’t even recognize how good it actually is.
Biography Studying the details of an author’s life, and by extension the social
and historical conditions in which a text was produced, may be interesting, but it
does little to reveal how a poem creates meaning. The work is not the writer,
nor is the writer the work. To confuse the two is to be led away from what
happens in the work.
Affect Just as readers digress by paying attention to the writer’s biography, they
also go astray by paying attention to their own reactions to the work. By asking
about its effect on an audience, particularly the emotional effect, the critic shifts
attention to results rather than means, from the literary text to the responses of
someone outside it. Such an approach will lead to no single meaning. It can
impose no standards. It results, say the formalists, in pure subjectivism.
Obviously, the formalist approach is not without its weaknesses and, needless
to say, those who would point them out. Chief among the complaints is that the
formalists have elevated the study of technique to the exclusion of the human
dimension—that they have turned reading into the solving of clever puzzles
and have lost the connections literature has with people and their lives.
Other objections come from those who find formalism too restrictive. David
Daiches, for example, argued against such a narrow focus on a piece of literature
as a work of art. Literature is, he asserted, many things at once: a social docu-
ment, a record of a writer’s thoughts and experiences, a commentary on life. To
narrow the range of its possibilities is to diminish it.
Finally, critics have charged that formalism works less well with some works,
perhaps even certain genres, than with others. It has proved to be especially helpful
with lyric poetry but less effective in understanding the essay or long, philosophical
poems. (Obviously, it is easier to deal with the formal elements of short texts than
with those of long ones.) That formalism has not worked particularly well for ana-
lyzing contemporary poetry suggests that, for the time being, it is more likely to be
found as part of other critical approaches than in essays that are purely formalist in
their techniques. Certainly formalism is alive and well in classrooms, where stu-
dents still learn to read closely and analytically and to support their interpretations
with examples drawn from the text under consideration.

WRITING A FORMALIST ANALYSIS

Prewriting
When you approach the actual writing of your analysis, you may find that your
reading log is mostly filled with definitions of words or lists of images. It is now
 48 CHAPTER 3
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time to see how those words and images are woven together, even those that do
not naturally fit. You may want to revisit the text, looking for patterns (recurrences
that appear with such regularity that they are eventually anticipated), visual motifs,
and repeated words and phrases; for significant connotations, multiple denotations,
allusions, and etymological ramifications to meaning; for unity, as expressed by the
meaningful coherence of all elements of the work; and for the tension produced by
paradox and irony.
Another approach to prewriting is to spend some time freewriting about
what you have read. You can begin with a symbol or a strong image and see
where it takes you. If the text has the unity a formalist looks for, any single
observation is likely to lead you to an understanding of the other aspects of the
text to which it is connected.

Drafting and Revising

The Introduction A common way to begin a formalist analysis is to present a
summary statement about how the various elements of the work come together
to make meaning. Such an opening announces the core of the analysis that the
rest of your paper will explain in more detail. Of course, if you choose this
approach, you will need to write at least a draft of your discussion before work-
ing on the introduction, because you have to know what you are going to say
before you can summarize it. An introduction that follows this pattern will
undoubtedly clarify your topic and intentions for your readers, but it may not
be the most attractive or interesting way to address them. A more colorful alter-
native is to begin by directly referencing the text itself. For example, if you are
working with a short story, you can recount a particularly meaningful incident
from it, or if you are writing about a poem, you can quote a few lines, followed
by an explanatory comment of why the excerpt is important to understanding
the work as a whole.

The Body The main part of your paper will be devoted to showing how the
various elements of the text work together to create meaning. You will want to
touch on the form, diction, and unity, citing examples of how they operate to-
gether and reinforce one another to develop a theme—a meaning that has some
universal human significance. Your job is to describe what you find in the work,
then to assess its effect on the whole. Where you find conflicts, or aspects of the
work that do not seem to lead to the same ends, you must work to resolve the
tension they create.
If a repeated image is dominant in a story, or a repeated phrase particularly
insistent, you may want to give it first place in your discussion. That is, you can
choose to begin with the most significant element in the work, letting it sub-
sume the other aspects that formalists consider important. On the other hand,
you may decide to treat form, diction, and unity as equally significant, giving
roughly the same amount of consideration to each.
You will also want to give a good bit of attention to any instances of para-
dox and irony, explaining how their presence in the work creates tension and
 FORMALISM 49
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how their resolution provides satisfaction. This is a good opportunity to draw

examples from the text or to quote significant passages. As in all critical essays,
references to the work that illustrate your discussion will both strengthen and
clarify what you are saying.
Keep in mind that it is more effective to organize your discussion around the
literary elements you have examined rather than follow the sequence of events in
a narrative or the stanzaic progression of a poem. For the writer who tries to
move sequentially through the text as the author has constructed it, making
analytical comments along the way, the temptation to forsake analysis and simply
summarize the work is hard to resist.

The Conclusion The end of your paper is an appropriate place to state (or
reiterate) the connection between form and content. Up to this point, you
have been describing how the text operates in particular ways and explaining
the meaning that emerges from those ways. Now you have the opportunity
to make some generalizations about the overall relationship of form and con-
tent. You can decide whether you have explored a text that has its own laws of
being and operates successfully within them, or whether it is a work in which
the formal elements, not easily reconciled, are eventually harmonized to make
meaning.

SUGGESTED READING

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Rev. ed.
London: Dobson, 1968.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert B. Heilman, eds. Understanding Drama: Twelve Plays. New
York: Holt, 1948.
Brooks, Cleanth, John T. Purser, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. An Approach to
Literature. 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975.
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Fiction. 3rd ed.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979.
———. Understanding Poetry. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.
Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1959.
Daiches, David. The New Criticism. Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland: Aquila, 1982.
———. “ The New Criticism: Some Qualifications.” College English 39 (February 1950):
64–72.
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1964.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. 3rd ed. New York: Noonday Press, 1961.
Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. New Brunswick, NH: Transaction
Publishers, 2004.
 Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

50
CHAPTER
3

Press of Kentucky, 1954.

approaches, visit www.cengagebrain.com.

Tate, Allen. Collected Essays. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959.

For up-to-date information on the many Web sites addressing formalist critical
Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University